The 4G LTE network will extend through Tucson between Interstate 10 and Harrison Road, north to Sunrise Drive and south to Valencia Road, including the Tucson International Airport.

That’s a bit curious actually, since the four thoroughfares specified don’t completely bound a region. Sunrise doesn’t extend all the way to Harrison, and Valencia is a bit discontinuous as well. Further, Interstate 10 bounds the bottom and left side of the box. I spent some time figuring out what that actually looks like, and created a google maps/earth .kmz overlay image, and image.

There’s a bit of interpolation going on here, namely assuming that Ina will bound the north part after Sunrise disappears, and that the jump from Sunrise to Harrison takes place like shown. It gives a decent impression of what the initial profile will be like, however.

A few things immediately stand out. First, there’s a bit of the east side that is genuinely clipped off. Second, south tucson between I-19 and I-10 doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s definitely a part of “Tucson,” yet the bounded region that Verizon stipulates would seem to preclude coverage making it down there. But perhaps the most head-scratchingly surreal part of the box is the fact that coverage will only extend to Sunrise.

Beyond and around the Sunrise/Skyline line is the foothills. This is the region where it makes the most sense to deploy 4G LTE due to the kind of neighborhood it is. Extending only to Skyline (and not even a little beyond) seems like a completely missed opportunity. It’ll be interesting to see the actual coverage profile and when things start rolling out. As of right now, I can confirm that there isn’t 4G LTE anywhere in town – I’ve tested at the airport, downtown, U of A, and throughout town with the HTC Thunderbolt, Pantech UML290, Samsung hotspot, and another unreleased datacard thus far to no avail. Hopefully it comes soon. Verizon has 22 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum (upper c block) in most of Arizona including Phoenix and Tucson. Only the far west part of Arizona has 34 MHz.

Update: 

Today Verizon Wireless announced that the Tucson, AZ market will be included in the August 18 nationwide LTE rollout. Last week I heard from a good friend of mine with a Droid Charge that LTE was working in various parts of Tucson already, no doubt as Verizon tests individual eNodeBs for functionality.

Update 2: 

At around 10:30 PM on August 17, Verizon 4G LTE went live in Tucson. Some people on Twitter sent me notifications about them seeing the service light up in areas that were even outside the circle painted by earlier press releases, so if you’re reasonably close to the boundary outlined in the press release, there’s a good chance LTE is active in your area.

One person tweeted a link to some speedtests, which show that things are indeed working:

Currently I don’t have any 4G LTE devices, but when I get another one for testing we’ll have a better picture of coverage and speeds in this market.

Update 3: 

It’s live, and it’s fast! I’ve tested it thoroughly and published some results already in the context of the Droid Bionic review, which is only a UE Category 2 device. Soon as I get a UE Category 3 LTE device I will run some more tests and get a better picture.

I thought it was interesting last time I came that most casino floors in Las Vegas had shockingly poor or non-existant UMTS (3G) coverage on AT&T. I guess I didn’t find it too shocking, since coverage inside buildings in a dense urban environment is probably the most challenging for mobile networks, but it seemed to be a consistent problem. After getting frustrated about 6 hours into my stay, I decided to switch entirely to EDGE for the duration just because of how annoying being constantly handed between GSM/EDGE and UMTS is when you’re trying to do things. For whatever reason, back then I didn’t think to pull up field test on the iPhone 3GS I was currently carrying to see what bands were assigned to which network technology.

Now that I’m back, I decided to check. Thankfully, Apple has restored most if not all of the Field Test data products in iOS 4.2.1, a huge step forward from 4.1 just allowing signal strength in dBm at top left, and a far cry from 4.0 which shipped with no field test whatsoever. To save potential readers some googling, to get here, enter *3001#12345#* from the dialer and hit call – if it hasn’t been removed yet, you’ll get dumped into Field Test on iOS.

In EDGE and tapping on GSM RR Info, it’s immediately obvious why I saw that behavior last time I was here:

ARFCN dictates what channel inside what band we’re on, and 142 just happens to lie inside the GSM 850 band. It’s a number basically used to refer to the FDD pair of frequencies the phone is currently using. You can calculate exactly what frequency downlink and uplink are on with a little math and some reference guide (there’s a good table here), but basically with an ARFCN of 142 we know immediately that GSM/EDGE is on AT&T’s 850 MHz spectrum. Between 128 and 251 is that GSM850 spectrum.

Now, what about UMTS/3G? Enabling 3G (look at how weak that signal is…) and going into UMTS RR info, I saw the following:

Looking at the fields “Downlink Frequency” and “Uplink Frequency” we can see the device’s UARFCN channel numbers. It’s the same thing, but U for UMTS. Again, with a reference aide (read: wikipedia) we can see that UMTS/3G is working in the PCS 1900 MHz band.

Remember that higher frequencies are less effective at propagating through buildings. It’s pretty obvious now why getting good 3G coverage on AT&T is a challenge deep inside a casino in Las Vegas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with putting GSM/EDGE on 850 and UMTS on 1900, it’s just interesting in practice how immediately obvious the difference is walking around. Propagation is a challenge in dense urban environments with lots of people moving around to begin with, I’m sure this doesn’t help in Las Vegas. AT&T promised to put all of its 3G (UMTS) network on the 850 MHz band (wherever it’s licensed to use it) by the end of 2010, but sadly that hasn’t happened quite yet, at least in this market. I’ll keep checking, but thus far it’s been solidly in 1900 PCS. Oh well.

To begin with, I acquired an OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB SSD and installed it in my 2010 MacBook Pro. I had been waiting for a while to do this move, particularly because I find the optical drive of marginal use and decided to try an OptiBay adapter which would let me use the optical drive’s space as an other 2.5″ bay for whatever I wanted. More on that later, but I moved the MBP’s rather generic 5400 RPM 500 GB traditional platter drive into this optibay space, and stuck the 120 GB Vertex 2 where the HDD was.

Just get to how you did it already!

Cloning the drive onto the SSD was easy, everything works fine, but I was left with that generic and somewhat ugly mechanical hard disk drive icon that OS X has stuck with since forever.

First, I set out to create an appropriate SSD icon. Getting a Vertex 2 image was pretty simple, and I cleaned it up, cropped it, and added the appropriate clipping mask/alpha channel (depending what name suits you) for transparency. It’s a nice big PNG here:

Vertex 2 SSD by OCZ

The next step was changing the icon. It used to be trivially simple in OS 9 to do this, but things got a bit more complicated in OS X. To do so, I found a program named (aptly enough) “Set Icon” you can get here.

Set Icon for OS X

Pretty straightforward. Select the drive, drag an icon in, and click set icon.

Now you’ll have something like this:

Mac SSD

Looks pretty good alongside the old icon, if I may say so myself: Pretty simple, right? Enjoy!

Doing indoor photography with my girlfriend – especially weddings – it becomes apparent just how many AAs you can go through quickly. So many that it’s relatively expensive and prohibitive to keep up and carry all those batteries around. They’re expensive, and just don’t last long enough. One or two hundred shots or so, if I recall correctly.

SB600 Flash

Anyhow, right after getting them and charging them, I decided to shoot a wedding with my SB600 flash and the NiZn batteries. I was immediately floored at how fast the flash recharged and how performance never seemed to fade like alkalines do. Usually, flash performance seems to fall off exponentially with the generic alkaline batteries – eventually the time it takes to recharge gets so long you can’t take photos of anything. So what’s useful about the NiZn was the hugely fast, super quick recharge time.

That’s also… the problem. While shooting that wedding, I managed to somehow completely blow out the flash. This thing was under 2 months old, used at a few other weddings, without what I’d consider very many activations at all. The SB600 apparently has no thermal cutoff at all, allowing the whole thing to overheat. Whatever the case, while shotgunning some photos of the dance floor in low light, it stopped working. The flash didn’t feel notably hot, but the flash showed an error on the screen and wouldn’t work from then on. Anyhow, I shipped the flash back into Nikon and had a replacement about a month later, but the point is that I’m now far too scared to repeat the “experiment” again.

It seems that two things are possible:

• The SB600 lacks adequate/any thermal protection preventing the flash from overheating or being fired too quickly
• The SB600 possibly relies on alkaline AA battery performance to prevent the flash from being overheated
  • I realize that the NiZn PowerGenix batteries are 1.6 volts (as opposed to the 1.5 standard for alkaline, and 1.2 for NiMH). At the same time, there should definitely be regulation of some kind preventing failure.

The batteries themselves are remarkable in their performance, but it’s that which scares me out of using them in the flash where they’re needed most.

NiZn PowerGenix AA Batteries

What brings this all up is that engadget compared the PowerGenix batteries to some of the other new (and exotic) choices from Energizer and Sanyo Eneloop, and I left a comment.

I purchased the NiZn batteries after your initial review and was super stoked when they came. I’m an avid digital photographer, and replacing flash batteries at a wedding actually gets expensive enough to make buying a bunch of rechargables worthwhile.

That said, I had a brand new SB600 (just like yours) burn out with no warning while shooting with the NiZn batteries. I had to ship the whole thing in and get it replaced. I browsed the Fred Miranda forums some time later and found a bunch of people with the same issue – the SB600 relies on Alkaline batteries simply not being able to drive enough power quick enough when shotgunning that flash to avoid burning out. There isn’t any thermal safeguard.

So be warned, even though you’re testing on an SB600, if you actually do go out and abuse the batteries like you would at a big event firing the flash a lot, you WILL nuke your stuff. I’m too scared to use my NiZn batteries now.

That Fred Miranda forum thread I mentioned is here.

See the update at the bottom for the real deal, I was partly wrong about some of the antennas in iPhone 4, though I was indeed right about the connector locations for the bottom, and partly for the top.

****

I’ve been following the iPhone 4G/HD leak saga like a hawk, and until now I haven’t been able to really add anything to all that’s been said. However, today, Gizmodo published pictures of the inside of the iPhone 4G hardware they obtained. They didn’t talk about much other than the absurd number of screws (upwards of 30), battery size, packaging, and potential ease of replacement. In fact, their primary aim seems to have been locating “APPLE” markings on the few ribbon cables inside, rather than picking apart Apple’s hardware choices. No doubt disassembly was challenging, potentially explaining why there aren’t any photos of the iPhone with the “connect to iTunes” lock screen (broken after disassembly?).

They neglected to remove the EMI shields atop the interesting bits on the PCB, what I would’ve considered the biggest news about the device. So we still don’t know virtually anything about SoC, how much NAND flash there is onboard, RAM, the hugely important baseband (and whether this thing is potentially dual CDMA/GSM and UMTS for it to work on Verizon/Sprint alongside T-Mobile and AT&T), WiFi or Bluetooth choices (likely the same as the iPad, however), or anything else you’d expect to glean without those shields in place. In short, all the squares in this diagram from the iPhone 3GS are big question marks for the iPhone 4G. Still, we can make very good guesses about what the likely choices are.

PCB components for the iPhone 3GS labeled by Phone Wreck

However, being the RF-obsessed dude I am, I scrutinized the photos for some time looking for other interesting bits. I think I’ve found some interesting things.

First and foremost, I think that there are two discrete antenna assemblies in the phone. One at the top, one at the bottom (as you’d hold it in your hand).

Red box is antenna 1, Blue is antenna 2. Source gallery

Note that the phone in this picture has been rotated; the red circled area on the hardware is actually the bottom. Now, look at the two places I’ve marked with the white arrows. You can very clearly see a pigtail and standard radio connector on the top one, and a connector pad at the tip of the arrow at right. This is 100% certainly an antenna, and it’s also in the same region of the hardware (at the bottom) as the 3GS.

Bottom Antenna - two connectors

Above is what I’m talking about at 100% resolution.

Bottom Antenna Connectors Plugged In

Above shows the antenna before being removed, with the pigtail clearly connected to the mainboard PCB. We can make an educated guess that whatever is under the EMI shield next door is the baseband.

Now, compare and contrast to the iPhone 3GS’s ribbon/kapton antenna assembly:

iPhone 3GS flex PCB

And see it inside the black plastic holder (only the trailing ribbon connector is visible at bottom left):

Flex PCB fits inside the black plastic case at bottom

If I’m not mistaken, the two connectors there are for discrete antennas inside, for cellular radio and WiFi/Bluetooth. I’m not infinitely familiar, but there only seems to be one antenna assembly in the 3GS at the bottom.

Now, on the iPhone 4G photos, there appears to possibly be a second possible antenna at the top.

Top antenna in place

Top antenna removed

I’ve labeled the connector that I can make out. Given the similar black packaging (possibly housing the flex PCB like in the 3GS), it seems likely this is another antenna.

I’ll leave you to speculate about why Apple might potentially want two discrete cellular antennas in their next generation phone…

Update:

After looking through the FCC OET internal photos of a huge number of other dual CDMA/UMTS design phones, all of which only require one antenna, I’m pretty sure the other top component is something less insidious. It’s entirely possible this is nothing more than a connector, some support structure, or perhaps maybe it is indeed an antenna, but for WiFi (N?). Whatever the case, I’m completely uncertain what this thing is, or if it’s part of the baseband. Obviously, the part at the bottom is an antenna, but the top part I’m more and more uncertain about.

We’ll see as time goes on and better pictures are made available what it is, but I’m not confident it’s an antenna anymore.

Update 2:

Of course, we now know the real deal with the iPhone 4. I was wrong about what the antennas were, but right about the connectors. Up at the top, if you scrutinize iFixit’s teardown, you can see a small gold pad right above a test junction for the WiFi/GPS/BT 2.4 GHz antenna. There’s a trace on the EMI shield which leads to a contact screw (gold, so it’s visible) leading directly to the antenna. So the connector for the 2.4 GHz antenna is up at the top near that seam.

iPhone 4 Top Connectors

For the UMTS/GSM antenna, the connector snakes across from the PCB to the left side of the phone facing up (facing down, it snakes to the right, like in this photo):

Inside the red square is the contact point

You can see the test point and connector at the left, the pigtail leading to the right across the EMI shield, and the gold screw which connects the whole deal to the aluminum antenna.

Of course, the interesting part is that this becomes the most active region of the antenna. It’s a monopole, rather than a dipole – in this configuration. The result is that for 1/4 wavelength, that part of the aluminum is very active at radiating RF. This is also the location your palm rests, interestingly.

I’m going to talk about the real deal on AnandTech shortly, so stay tuned…

It’s live here now: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/1

1 – Google Voice Integration: No Go

This still remains a no-show. Apple and Google relations have only continued to sour, despite the Steve-Eric coffee shop PR stunt meeting that was hugely popularized a few weeks ago. In fact, because Apple has repeatedly demonstrated no motivation to popularize any Google services anymore, it’ll likely never happen. This is yet another unfortunate artifact of the ongoing Google and Apple divorce process, and it just ends up stifling innovation. Apple and Google both give end-user focused experience an awful lot of lip service, up to the point where they have to integrate with other competitors offerings.

Google Voice is just one such example, but there are others. Mail on the iPhone still lacks support for Google’s unique organizational methods, and for the same token, Google refuses to this day to make their own iPhone OS gmail client. It works both ways, and both are equally guilty.

Back to that lip service I was talking about, you can really see just how far that philosophy goes from both companies actions – they still speak louder than words. As an end user, I don’t care about corporate bickering or what the political reasons are for Google not making a Gmail app for the iPhone, or Apple not integrating Google Voice – I just want the best experience.

2 – Google Latitude: Maybe

I’m not sure how to mark this one down. On one hand, there is indeed multitasking present in the operating system, as well as the ability to have certain applications periodically get location through location services. Thus, it’s finally possible for some enterprising third party developer to make their own google latitude updater, or for Google themselves to do it. We’ll probably see the former much earlier than the latter for the reasons I mentioned in part 1.

Of course, the software to do continual scheduled Google latitude position updating already exists through the Cydia store. It’s called Longitude, and it work fabulously. I’m relatively puzzled by Apple’s claims that getting a full GPS fix requires too much battery, since I already run Longitude on a 15 minute update interval and have experienced negligible battery degradation. In fact, even with updating set on a 10 minute schedule, there was no perceptable difference in battery life.

Longitude - You know, opposite of Latitude

I really have to wonder whether location services through Skyhook without using AGPS (eg only WiFi triliteration augmented with cellular positioning data) will be accurate enough for services like Foursquare. Time will tell, and arguably GPS won’t solve everything since users that are already inside those locations can’t get a GPS fix anyways.

3 – Better Gmail Integration: Sort of

So the Mail application is getting a definite overhaul in this new revision of iPhone OS – more than one exchange account, faster switching between each inbox, unified inbox, and support for threaded conversations. These are long overdue features that the competition has had almost forever. WebOS has had it, BlackBerry is famous for it, Android has it alongside even a Gmail-specific version, and even Windows Mobile had multiple exchange account and fast switching integration.

So it’s nice to see everything finally getting revamped. Apple’s interface still is minimalist though; there’s no font settings or style options to be found.

4 – Notification Overhaul: Nope

This is probably the most sorely lacking area, and simultaneously the most inexplicably neglected. Every single other mobile platform has better notifications than iPhone OS. Every one of them, even old and exiled Windows Mobile. In fact, during the Stevenote today Apple showed off some local application notifications (from applications running in the background) that still resulted in annoying centered blue bubbles – and touted them as being a good thing!

I don’t know what more there is to say here other than that with a more robust multitasking framework needs to come a better notification framework. The two go hand in hand completely: if you lack the screen real estate to show more than one thing at a time, but can still run it on the hardware, get information to the user effectively. That shouldn’t still equate to pausing and interrupting the current interaction with a gigantic blue popup that needs to be dismissed before interaction can continue.

5- Background apps done right: Yes

Apple needed to nail this one, and they did. There’s no arguing that the multitasking framework they’ve demoed is the way things should be. I’ve argued a few times with developers that the best way to deliver multitasking without sacrificing performance is to open APIs for the most common use scenarios. Apple enumerated all of them: music in the background, task completion, location-specific scenarios (turn by turn GPS, Google Latitude, e.t.c.), and a few others. This is effectively what I’ve heard described as a secondary “lite” binary running the core services in the background, using fewer resources and a few background specific APIs the OS can manage. That way, the background experience is consistent across use scenarios.

I think that this will work really well in the long run. In fact, Apple really did have little choice but to adapt a scheme employing lite binaries; they’re limited to 256 MB of RAM on the 3GS and iPad. Steve Jobs gets it – giving the user a task manager might appeal in the short term for how much control it offers, but it’s just too much. If the user is honestly expected to micromanage application launches and closes, they’ll eventually forget and nuke the battery. It just happens.

6- Better App organization: Yes

Thank goodness this is finally being addressed. I’ve almost reached the 180 application limit for the iPhone 3.x’s page specific interaction schema, and getting to applications on pages at the very end is as frustrating as it is time consuming. Finally getting some high level organization in the picture, even if it isn’t forward thinking, revolutionary, or something new, still is valuable.

Folders - Kind of ad-hoc, but better than nothing

7- Better power management: Nope

Definite no, in fact, we’ll probably never see this, at least on the iPhone OS. This particular platform is all about lowest common denominator usability – it’s simultaneously what makes the platform so alluring and magical, and the subject of so much griping. You can’t build something a baby can use, and then expect them to understand how to manage their power.

At the same time however, the option should be there for those of us that are knowledgeable about it. I realize I’m asking too much, but it’d be amazingly cool to see hardware reports on projected battery longevity, current draw from individual hardware components, and a trend of power use.

Conclusions: 4/7 ~ 57% Nailed

So Apple implemented 4 out of the 7 things I outlined, if we’re pretty generous about our criteria. You know, on the whole, 57% isn’t bad, but it simultaneously isn’t a slam dunk on my part.

In fact, that’s what makes this industry so interesting. Unlike the desktop, we haven’t yet settled on a paradigm user interaction model – each major platform is actively innovating and evolving, and it’s happening rapidly. Even in the last two years, we’ve seen Android go from being an iPhone OS wannabe to a seriously polished, worthy competitor. We’ve seen that cross carrier availability is hugely important for success (people just don’t want to switch, and they’ll convince themselves that their network is best). We’ve seen that none of the platforms have it all worked out. Apple’s iPhone OS platform is too closed, while Android’s might be just too open (a-la Windows Mobile). It’s a rapidly evolving market out there folks; I’m enjoying scrutinizing every bit of it.

The other day, one of my Twitter followers asked if I could post a list of iPhone applications I have installed that are useful. Right now, there are quite a few (145 icons by my count).  I’ll share a gallery of all of them, and post a list with links to the ones I really like or use a lot.

It’s a definite goal to reach the installed application limit, and admittedly the organization of just a bunch of tiles on a grid is already stretched thin. I originally did a better job organizing applications by page such that similar tasks or groups were all consolidated. For example, games are all on one page, utilities are on another, e.t.c., but it’s fallen apart lately.

The irony is that there isn’t an app you can install that will tell you what other apps are installed because of sandboxing reasons and App Store restrictions. Oh, Apple…

Favorite Apps

Some of my favorite and most used applications are:

• Speedtest.net – This is the iPhone version of Ookla’s speedtest.net. It used to be absolutely positively horrible. I mean not just totally false – but boldfaced staring you in the face wrong. They’ve improved it a ton in recent updates, and it now supports exporting to CSV as I’ve mentioned before, including all the geospatial, test results, and other relevant data. Makes analysis possible for end users, not just them.

• Xtreme Speedtest – Before Ookla got off their collective arses and made the speedtest.net application work, this was my favorite. I’m ashamed to admit I ran it as much as I did. Lately there haven’t been any updates or any love for even the paid “pro” version.

• Jaadu RDP – Hands down the best remote desktop application. It’s also the most expensive at $24.99, which is annoying, but it truly does work the best. Integration is just extremely smooth and well executed. There’s also Jaadu VNC.

• Mark the Spot – This should come preinstalled on every single iPhone. If you’re on AT&T, this is your best friend. It’s both a way to report bad connectivity and vent when coverage sucks too.

• BeeJive IM – All around best IM application. It was one of the first to really leverage push notifications well, and keeps you logged in for as long as you’d like. It’s a brave new world being logged into IM on the phone all the time, but if you want it, this is what’s awesome.

• Gass Cubby – Keeps track of gas mileage. It does an awesome job, and is fast and easy enough that I do it every time. It even syncs back up to the cloud for backups and storage, or if you have multiple drivers on a car. The graphical visualization and ability to correlate fuel economy changes with service is what really makes it stand out.

• iStat – Although the real beauty of this application is that it ties into the dashboard widget and server daemons of its namesake, it also works great as a simple resource monitor and informational view. There’s more info about everything here.

• SpaceTime – This is the absolute best computer algebra system for the iPhone. It’s that simple. There’s 3D plotting, derivatives, integrals, and just about everything else you can get from a Ti-89. I still like my 89, but this is the next best thing.

• Pi Cubed – Another really good mathematical tool, this one finally leverages the full capacitive touch screen of the platform. There isn’t a virtual keyboard or buttons, but rather a more intuitive interface with pretty print that’s better. I really like that it can export to PDF and LaTeX dynamically.

• iSynth and Seadragon - These are both awesome Microsoft Research Labs applications that exist on the iPhone. The former is a photosynth viewer created by a software intern as an independent project, and it works surprisingly well. The Seadragon viewer lacks the photosynth code and just displays images using the same sort of algorithm.

• iRa Pro and IP Vision – If you have a network camera that has MJPEG streaming outputs, these should be on your phone. No excuses. iRa Pro is an $899 application (last I checked, the most expensive in the App Store) but delivers absolutely unparalleled integration with the big enterprise camera setups including PTZ and up to 6 camera streams at a time. If you don’t have a fancy enterprise setup, IP Vision lets you view one MJPEG stream and 2 stills at a time, which is totally adequate for most everything. It’s what I end up using most of the time, and is considerably cheaper at $7.99 – there’s also a more expensive version that works with PTZ cameras.

• Pocket Universe – This was the first augmented reality application, and for its purpose, the implementation is superb. It’s designed to be an aide for amateur astronomers trying to find a particular celestial body of note. It uses compass and accelerometer data to point you in the right direction, toward finding it.

• JotNot – It’s a document scanner using your iPhone’s camera. The beauty here is that it removes the distortion based on edge detection, works for large documents, posters, books, and other rectangular, er, media. The other awesome part is that it tightly integrates for output over email, evernnote, WebDAV/iDisk, Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box.net. Either PDF or JPEG output with optional OCR to boot! I use this one a lot.

There are a ton of others that are installed, but these are the ones that really stick out to me as being relatively undiscovered. If you’ve got others you think are useful or related, I’d love to hear about ‘em in the comments section!

I played around with the product all last week and finally think I know all there is to be gleaned about it - undoubtedly in time the handover performance (which is pretty abysmal) will improve. It’s something that I talk about a lot in the article itself, but exists across all the major femtocells, and T-Mobile’s implementation of UMA. From a technical standpoint, the problem seems to be that the phone almost treats the femtocell like a roaming tower – implicitly disabling soft handovers to the public network. It’s handled this way most likely for a billing segmentation reason, but that’s unclear.

I learned in the comments that there are enterprise picocells, although I’m not sure what kind of carrier interaction is required for installation. I’d really like to investigate those for something future. Whatever the case, if you’re interested definitely give it a read!

MIX10 Keynote Stage

I’ve been writing a lot over that time with AnandTech, which I’ll wrap up here:

• First day MIX10 Windows Phone 7 Series Impressions – link
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview – link
• Windows Phone 7 Series: The AnandTech Guide – link
  • If you had to read any one of these, this would be the one to be. It’s over 8000 words and comprehensively wraps up the platform in my opinion.

AnandTech - Bing search hands on

There were a couple hilarious quotes that I overheard at the conference, which I think I’ll just share briefly. Keep in mind this is at a development conference.

1. “…and we call this checkbox driven development. We can do everything we want just with checkboxes”
2. “…and we only had to write one line of code! Just one line, and we’re done!”
3. But my favorite: “Can I use the back button for fire? What if I really really want to use the back button?” – immediately after a presentation about how the back button is reserved for going back.

But I did break that trend this year a bit. I noticed an intriguing project by Robert Scoble on a blog post of his involving taking photos of notes by the attendees and posting them to flickr. Intrigued, I expected to be wowed by the different creative and thoughtful methods employed which I could use myself for note-taking.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when what I saw that most attendees were either using their iPhones or BlackBerries, scraps of paper, nonstandard spiral bound notebooks, or just generally chaotic methods for taking notes. I mean, aside from the now-famous mind-mapping note girl (photo here; I can’t look at it again because it makes my brain hurt and my teeth start gnashing), there really wasn’t anything TED-level-inspiring.

Numerical Breakdown

Let’s just break it down for a second:

• 34 pictures in the set
  • Mobile devices: 9 – 26.5%
    • iPhones: 7 – 20.6%
    • BlackBerry: 2 – 5.9%
  • Paper: 25 – 73.5%
    • Notebooks (spiral or bound): 14 – 41.2%
    • Mini Notebooks (or similarly sized): 6 – 17.6%
    • Program/Scraps: 4 – 14.7%
    • PowerPoint Handouts (Bill Gates): 1 – 2.9%

Generally, I abhor excel plots, but this does a good job communicating my point:

Notes Breakdown

But that’s not all; of the iPhone note photos, virtually every single one used the built-in notes application. Yeah, the notes application that ships with the iPhone which lacks just about everything imaginable.

A typical AT&T "Mark The Spot" report

No Evernote love? No Google Documents love? That’s certainly surprising. Yet these attendees consider themselves shakers and movers? Definitely avant-garde? Perhaps ahead of the curve at adoption of new tech? Sorry, virtually every one of you was thoroughly beaten by mind-map girl entirely by default, entirely because of her uniqueness factor. Even more surprising, the journalists in the photo set aren’t even using Steno pads.

With the exception of Bill Gates (who obviously is using PowerPoint handouts for his presentation), there’s really no excuse.

Granted, this could entirely just be bad sampling on Scoble’s part. Whatever the case, it’s a unique opportunity to segue into how much I love the way I take notes.

OneNote – The best kept secret for organizing everything

Ok, those words aren’t entirely my own, but they’re the truth. Microsoft OneNote 2007 (and its predecessor) aren’t just about notes, they’re about collecting, organizing, searching, and making accessible just about anything and everything. You don’t need a tablet, and it isn’t just about text. I think it’s pretty fair to say that OneNote is almost the best kept secret and most undiscovered part of Office 2007.

Relatively Typical Notes View

My freshman year of college, I decided that I wanted to try using it for all of my notes. At the time, I was intrigued by the notion of using a Samsung Q1 Ultra V, a UMPC, due to its tiny form factor and long battery life. That worked, but I’ve since moved on to a Latitude XT in favor of its active digitizer and capacitive multitouch screen. Regardless, I’ve used OneNote for virtually all my notes since, and it has numerous advantages over paper:

Search Results

1. My notes are searchable, entirely. Not just text in its native form either, but handwritten text from the tablet, images (it searches the images), and audio.
2. I don’t have to carry around spiral bound notebooks that are heavy, or waste money on dead trees (hey, this is one aspect of my life that actually is green).
3. I can annotate and take notes directly atop PDFs, PowerPoints, or whatever materials are being studied without having to print them beforehand. This is extremely useful as I can get anything into notes by printing it to OneNote.
4. My notes can be (and are) backed up regularly. That’s something you can’t really do with paper notes, short of making copies or scanning every day.
5. I can keep every year’s worth of notes in one place. Obviously, that’s a ton of stuff 3 years in. I think you’d be hard pressed to carry around your spiral bound notebooks every day.
6. I can organize with sections, tabs, notebooks, and pages. The analogues to a notebook are obvious, but there are other things as well that make a lot more sense in the context of digital notes.
7. Something which always comes in handy is being able to instantly send my notes to other people; I can make PDFs of pages, sections, or entire notebooks.
8. Everything lives in one place: text notes, powerpoints, images, clips of webpages, even file.

I honestly can’t see how it’d be possible to take notes electronically without OneNote at this point. Granted, there are a lot of other alternatives, but I find that they either have gamestopping flaws or are otherwise unwieldy:

• Microsoft Word
  • I see this one a lot in classes, and don’t even know where to start. Word is great as a word processing tool, but that’s about all. Sure, you can take notes, but they won’t be searchable (which is a huge drawback for me), and ultimately you’re constrained by this page-by-page model that lies at its core. Combining graphics with notes is possible, but hard. OneNote is almost like Word without pages.
  • How the heck are you supposed to take equations down quickly in Word? If you’ve used the equation editor, you know what a lesson in frustration it is.
• Google Docs
  • I think using google documents makes a lot of sense, especially given the online nature, but it seems just as difficult to manage with lots of media. Of course, the fact that you can access it anywhere is a huge plus.
• /LyX
  • A while back on Slashdot I read a great article I could relate to about taking notes in class for science and engineering. It discussed/asked what the optimal computerized note-taking suite was given an emphasis on entering equations. Of course, came up, along with its GUI-wrapped similar cousin LyX. I’m a big big fan of , especially for documents and other things, but I can’t see it being practical or fast enough for taking notes every day. Granted, there are people out there (like some of my crazier friends) that are faster at typing the equations than writing them, but I find myself being able to write faster.
  • You run into the same problems that Word has here; you’re stuck managing files for each set of notes.

I’ve been meaning to try Evernote, and have heard great things about integration across virtually every platform. It seems like the way to go, and if I’d definitely like to try it out.

I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that there are so many better solutions than just using pen and paper or the default notes application that ships with most smartphones. Even though those are what you might grab for at first, you’re setting yourself up to be locked into two methods that leave much to be desired.